


GraGoh Drabbles

by goldleaf1066



Category: The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)
Genre: Alien anatomy, Drabbles, Falling In Love, Other, Sharing a Bed, Skeksis - Freeform, Slice of Life, Slow Burn, urRu - Freeform, urskek lore
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-01 17:14:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 7,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23720656
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldleaf1066/pseuds/goldleaf1066
Summary: A drabble collection charting the deepening of the relationship between skekGra and urGoh in the Circle of the Suns.
Relationships: skekGra/urGoh (Dark Crystal)
Comments: 42
Kudos: 46





	1. Nose to Tail

**Author's Note:**

> I love these old gay wizards with all my heart.
> 
> This takes place at some indeterminate time-period before the events of the show. I've also not put in the pauses in urGoh's speech for the sake of flow. But for full immersion, you may read his dialogue sloooowly ;)

He catches himself looking at him. Looking and looking and catching himself catching himself and justifying it. There is little else of interest to gaze upon in the desert after a circuit of their home and a glance from horizon to horizon. The dunes changed, slipping endlessly over themselves, but they were dunes. Sand, sky, sun. 

UrGoh.

UrGoh is interesting and skekGra steals studies of the lines of him, marking down in his memory (for what purpose he can’t quite pinpoint) the particular sway of his braids as his impractical gait takes him from workbench to garden to bed, the twitch of his tail tip when he finds something amusing, and the length, no, the _height_ of him, crumpled in atrocious posture. His neck, his back, his legs are long, but he hides it well in a bent-kneed shamble, slow and slower as the days wear on. To unfold him would be a vision in itself, skekGra thinks, and tries to content himself with what measure of urGoh he can get from his semi-sprawled positions in slumber, all looped and hanging from his sleeping chair, feet dangling at one end, snores rumbling from the other. 

One morning skekGra emerges from his own bed-space to see urGoh reaching for dried herbs hanging from a shelf, a straight line from nose to tail as he stands almost at full stretch, secondary arms steadying himself on the apothecary bench before him, tail against the floor for balance. 

UrGoh notices he is being watched and turns his head toward him. SkekGra is at a brief loss for words.

“You’re taller than me,” he says at last. UrGoh’s tail tip twitches against the sandy floor.

“Are you surprised?” 

“Yes,” skekGra admits, approaching him just to make sure. UrGoh unhooks the herb bundle and holds it in one hand. He remains standing with two palms flat on the wooden table-top, looking down his nose at skekGra for what must be the first time since they met. All told, he’s about half a head taller than skekGra; so used to seeing him in his perpetual crouch skekGra forgets they are more or less the same sort of entity, albeit one with more sanded-down edges than the other. Strange-limbed, sunken-chested, and both far larger than any gelfling. SkekGra looks up at the remaining hanging herbs, well out of his own reach. It has never occurred to him to wonder who put them there in the first place.

“Does it bother you?” UrGoh prompts, which seems an odd question on the face of it until skekGra remembers that a lot of things ‘bother’ him: the heat, the cold, the breeze, the lack thereof, his aching bones, the food, and the sand, everywhere, always. He makes no effort to cease mentioning these and others at many intervals throughout their days. UrGoh seems only to be preparing himself for another to add to the list.

“No,” he says after thinking, and it’s the truth. “I like it.” He reaches up, _up!_ , to push a stray strand of urGoh’s hair from his eyes, tucking it under his hat. 

UrGoh doesn't comment on the gesture, looking instead at his hands on the table-top. “It’s not that easy. Not any more.”

SkekGra thinks about his aching bones again and knows what urGoh means, but still, advancing age seems a poor excuse to avoid the delight of seeing his other half like this, _like him_. A reminder of the youth they never shared, or perhaps just his all-consuming magnetism toward urGoh in particular. 

“Here,” he says, taking the herbs from urGoh and motioning for him to put his hands on his shoulders. UrGoh smiles, and figuring out what skekGra has in mind finds, somehow, his waist in the folds of his robes and plants his hind-hands there. SkekGra sets the herbs on the table and steps back. UrGoh follows, sandaled feet careful not to tread on skekGra’s hems. 

“Are we dancing, Heretic?” asks urGoh. 

“Can you?” skekGra asks sceptically. His own hands he slips into urGoh’s hair at the back of his neck, tangling his fingers pleasantly.

“I’m not that frail,” urGoh chides.

“ _I_ might be,” skekGra says. They’re in the middle of the room now and all of a sudden it’s urGoh that’s holding them both up, or so it feels. SkekGra leans into him, face against his chest as urGoh’s arms lace themselves around him.

“I was always the victor,” he says against urGoh. He can feel the thrum of his steady pulse against his cheek. “If you can call what I did victorious, but no-one with open arms to return to after days and weeks of battle. Nothing of the sort.” He closes his eyes, feels urGoh’s embrace tighten and the weight of the urRu’s head softly press against his shoulder. “No-one to protect the protector.”

“And now?” urGoh asks. He’s running a hand over skekGra’s back in absent patterns, over and over.

“I have you,” says skekGra. 

“You have me.”


	2. Home From Home

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> UrGoh finds a better place to sleep.

“How is that comfortable?” skekGra asks one morning, nodding toward urGoh’s sleeping chair from which urGoh is in the middle of extricating himself. Like most things urGoh does, it is not a quick process. His feet are on the floor at least and he pauses at skekGra’s question with a hand on each knee. His hind arms are occupied in holding himself up in a more or less sitting position.

“It works for me,” urGoh says eventually, but skekGra doesn’t appear satisfied. He steps into the garden, letting the vines he was holding out of his way fall back behind him like a curtain. Standing beside urGoh, he raps a knuckle on the sleeping chair’s frame.

“Bad back, hard bed?”

UrGoh offers him something of a shrug, leveraging himself from his sitting position into his usual crouching stance, tail sliding from the chair onto the floor and scattering sand.

“Try it, if you like.”

SkekGra cocks his head. “And where would you sleep?”

UrGoh doesn’t answer, making his ponderous way out of the garden, the hanging leaves catching gently in his hair and trailing along his sloping back.

*

SkekGra, after his questions, becomes more interested in the sleeping chair. He traces its flowing lines with a finger when he passes it, sits on it while working pestle and mortar, copies the swirls and spirals carved into the wood into a journal he keeps otherwise full of scribblings on herbs and berries and dreams. He lies on it exactly once, and gives up after a decent amount of effort, turning and fidgeting and repositioning his limbs and tail this way and that and hating every combination.

He comes to the conclusion that there is no way in Thra urGoh ever has a comfortable night’s sleep. And by extension maybe no Mystic ever has, so why urGoh’s attachment to it?

 _No other Mystic_ , he thinks, and it dawns on him one morning as he holds a bowl of tea between his gloved fingers, watching urGoh stretch with joints cracking, and manoeuvre himself out of bed once again over the course of several minutes. 

“Does it remind you of home?” skekGra asks as urGoh approaches him. He hands him a second bowl of tea, and urGoh takes it in one hind-hand, rearranging his other limbs to sit beside skekGra on the little breakfast bench they share without too much elbowing. From it, is a perfect view of the suns-rise from the doorway. 

“Home,” urGoh mulls, and seems content to lap at his tea without further comment.

SkekGra clenches his jaw and gentles his tone. “Your bed, the chair.” He remembers the interminable fiasco of time and effort it took to haul the thing up into the Circle of the Suns in the first place, transported in pieces. UrGoh had rebuilt it and has slept on it - clambering into the scoop of the seat and resting his jaw on the headrest, configuration of endless arms and legs unknown beneath the blankets and heavy tail lolling - every night since. 

“Odd,” urGoh murmurs, looking out toward the horizon, “that you speak of home,” he swings his head around to stare at skekGra, “to the Wanderer.”

“Oh, forget it!” skekGra snaps, though not with much heat. They finish their tea together in silence.

*

It has opened a small wound, nothing more than a papercut or the scratch of grass against bare calves, but niggling nonetheless. As urGoh looks at his bed-space that evening, blanket in hand, he hears the sigh he releases rustle the leaves nearby more than he remembers uttering it. 

He’s never picked at the thread of why he insisted on bringing his chair here. It’s a tapestry too old and faded after so long apart from his kin to withstand any serious unstitching. 

It was impossible to take with him on his travels, always waiting back in the valley, back home. When he left for the last time he dragged it with him, sealing within himself the decision that he would not be coming back.

There is no less love in his heart for his kin, the long faces and kind, sad eyes and slender-fingered hands that so fondly would hold his own. At night he thinks of them before sleep enrobes him. Lying how they lie, arranged how the other Mystics are arranging themselves on bed-chairs of their own, in the Valley, so far away.

One last little connection. 

But it does hurt his back.

*

The lanterns are burning down and skekGra’s snores, low as they are, can be heard alongside the creak of the wooden ramp beneath urGoh’s feet as he makes his deliberate way to the top.

Halfway up he wonders if he’s making a wise decision.

He sits up there, of course, to smoke or to meditate or to think, but he’s never seen how skekGra uses the space and skekGra has never bothered to enlighten him. The hanging fabrics he pushes aside with his staff to reveal at first glance, as his eyes adjust to the flickering of the dying light, what appears to be a pile of blankets in the middle of the space and nothing else.

As he sits beside them and begins to remove his spiral-stitched coat, the pile sighs and shifts like the dunes outside their home. 

“If you wanted your pipe you should’ve gotten it earlier,” the blankets say groggily. Then, when they receive no answer, they huffily reorder themselves to reveal a pointed nose and a pair of eyes peering out from the snugness within. “I said-‘ skekGra begins, then pauses mid-sentence when he sees that urGoh is not gathering his smoking paraphernalia at all, but laying out a blanket of his own and unlacing the coat from his back. It slides from his shoulders and onto the floor with a thud.

SkekGra sits up, shedding bedding. “Change your mind?”

“I became… curious,” urGoh says, the rolling the word around on his tongue like a boiled sweet before spitting it out. Two of his hands are occupied in undoing the machinations keeping his tail-covering in place, while the second pair are smoothing out his blanket on the wooden floor. “After your questions,” he adds after a moment, glancing down at his proposed bed.

“And your conclusion was that the floor would be an improvement?” SkekGra cocks his head and urGoh just gives him a lost little look. 

“I thought there were cushions,” he admits. SkekGra rolls his eyes but not unkindly.

“There are,” he says. Then, “Get in.”

Under skekGra’s blankets are the cushions, and skekGra himself. UrGoh considers this and noting the heap of skekGra’s robes in the corner begins to remove his shirt.

“I can…” skekGra begins, then gets flustered. He starts again. “I can put some of those back on if you prefer.” 

UrGoh glances at the parts of skekGra he can see: shoulders and arms and deep scoop of collarbones. Everything else is beneath the blankets, the edges of which are crumpled in the tight grip of one of skekGra’s hands. 

“What do you prefer?” urGoh asks, gesturing to his own clothes, half on, half off. SkekGra says nothing and slides down beneath the covers again. He holds urGoh’s gaze, something wary and something seeking burning within it.

He can feel skekGra watching him as he pulls the shirt over his head in a tangle of elbows. “Which one of us,” he asks, face obscured by cloth, “got the better end of the deal I wonder?”

“What?” skekGra says, a little too quickly. Caught looking.

UrGoh glances at him, then goes back to his undressing, unfastening his sandals, his hair obscuring almost everything between his chin and his belly, a soft little curve on his otherwise bony frame. His ribs and hip-bones protrude as much as skekGra’s, the other observes. “Now that we are able to look at each other.”

It takes enough time for urGoh to extricate his long legs and feet from his trousers for skekGra to cotton onto his meaning. “I did,” he says, and wants to spill into the silence that follows how the collection of angles and swirls-on-skin and interminable, excruciating slowness that is, was and always will be urGoh has become to him a miscellany of all that is beautiful, but he keeps his jaw clamped shut and his tongue pressed to the roof of his mouth. He feels precarious enough as it is and his confidence in knowing urGoh’s intent about anything, normally clouded by a vague terror of offending him with assumptions, seems now entirely opaque.

“I would disagree,” urGoh says, “but I haven’t looked in a mirror for some time. Perhaps you are right.”

“You’re unbelievable,” skekGra says as urGoh lifts the blankets and begins to negotiate himself and all six of his limbs beneath them. SkekGra realises he himself is diminishing, moving a leg away, curling in on himself to take up less space lest any part of their bodies touch. UrGoh, either oblivious, or more likely, with a deliberateness set to quash that nonsense right from the start, settles himself on his side, and slides a warm and dry palm over one of skekGra’s hands without comment.

At skekGra’s tensing, he soothes. “I only want to know you are there.”

“I’m always here,” skekGra says. His voice, schooled into a whisper now, cracks a little, and he swallows. “How are the cushions?”

“I could get used to them,” urGoh says, “though I’m not sure what to do with my other arms.” He shifts, twisting a little to free the limbs he’s lying on. Satisfied, he rests his head on the cushion they are using as a pillow, and sighs gently through his nostrils. “I think I got a good deal,” he says.

“I’ve not looked in a mirror for some time either, you know, so I can’t verify your claim.”

“You can look at me.”

SkekGra loses a last wavering strand of inhibition and shuffles closer into the radius of urGoh’s body heat. UrGoh hums quietly, breath ghosting across the skin of skekGra’s throat. The tips of their noses are touching. 

“Then I am wonderful.”

UrGoh smiles, eyes closing. 

“You are more than that,” he says against skekGra’s mouth. “You are home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> gay grandpas intensifies


	3. Age Before Beauty

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> SkekGra learns to love himself a little more.

One day urGoh finds a mirror amongst the errata he has traded with the Dousan. He holds it up to show skekGra, who, in coming closer to see what it is his mystic is proffering him, catches a flash of a high brow ridge, a deep-socketed eye, and wisps of grey hair in its reflection. The mirror is a small thing to urGoh, fitting in the palm of his long-fingered hand, but would have graced some gelfling’s dressing table at one time, and reflected back a comelier subject. 

SkekGra changes course and turns his head away.

“Very nice,” he says. “Did you get anything useful?” 

UrGoh looks put out, but only for a moment. SkekGra is busying himself with the contents of a messy shelf and making it only messier, and doesn’t see the frown or hear the sigh that come from urGoh’s direction as he turns the looking-glass to his own face. 

“I didn’t realise,” says urGoh after a moment, putting the mirror back into the pack he had produced it from with one hand and removing tubers and gourds with two of his others, “that I had gotten so old.”

“Hmmh,” is all skekGra can utter, mood suddenly like milk too long in the sun. At no further response from urGoh, he glances up. “Vain?” 

UrGoh cocks his head at him. “No,” he says, putting the gourds into a basket and carrying it into the garden. His voice trails out from between the urdrupe vines. “Just old.”

*

To him, urGoh doesn’t look old. His hair is greyer than it used to be, the swirling wrinkles on his face more numerous, his gait, somehow, even slower as the trine roll by. To skekGra, urGoh is as he always has been.

A mirror.

 _He’s_ not vain, he tells himself, stalking out onto the promontory outside the doorway of their home. The wind is light, and the suns hidden by rare clouds. Below, the sands shift under their shadow, their golden hue now a myriad purples and deep lilacs. “Not vain,” he says to himself, crouching near the edge and looking over. 

He’s not blind to the changes in his other half, nor ignorant to the number of times the Brothers have performed their endless circuit above him, but the sight of himself in the quickness of the mirror had given him a shock. Grey hair, less hair, old old old.

Thinking about his mortality is distasteful, even now. He owns no mirror, or at least didn’t, and closes his eyes when ducking his head toward the bathwater lest he catch sight of his reflection before the plunge. Mortality means an end. An end to their work here, their tireless efforts destined to be left incomplete when he crumbles to dust amongst them. 

An end to his time with urGoh, which seems the worst thing of all.

*

“I don’t like it,” he says later, as their noses are in their soup bowls. 

UrGoh, choosing now as one of his telepathic moments, murmurs into his stew. “Would you prefer to gaze at the crystal instead of your reflection?”

SkekGra almost chokes. “What do you think?” he bristles, but urGoh merely continues nosing at the vegetables. It’s a trap he falls into every single time. A silence he feels compelled to fill and this time he decides to do away with the long moments of huffiness and has out with it, looking at and gripping his soup-bowl with equal consternation.

“Growing old,’ he begins, pauses, and starts again, “I didn’t know I looked like this. I mean of course I know what I look like, but I'm not as I remember. I... avoided myself. After.” He tilts his head to show urGoh the nail, as if urGoh is ignorant of what has been giving him his phantom headache for all of these trine. “So long being told we were immortal, and knowing that’s not true. I feel sometimes that my body is dying all around me. Seeing myself,” he flaps a hand in the direction of the mirror, still packed away in urGoh’s bag, “reminded me of that.”

UrGoh lifts his head. “I feel my mortality just as strongly.”

“But how do I live with dying?” skekGra is wide-eyed, incredulous. “How do _you_ live with it?”

UrGoh sets down his bowl and spends some time finding his feet. “Let me show you what I see.”

“I don’t want to see, urGoh.” 

“I will show you, and you will look,” urGoh says, making his way to the bag and delving into it again. He holds up the mirror, and on his return to the bench they share he turns skekGra's head with gentle fingers on his jaw to look into it.

“Open your eyes, Heretic.”

“Fine.”

“What do you see?”

“I thought this was about what you see?”

“Who am I if not you?”

SkekGra grumbles, in no mood for mystic nonsense, and looks at his own face in the palm of urGoh’s hand. Properly, without shying away.

“I see wrinkles, deep ones. As if someone is carving out each trine of my life into my skin. I hate them.” 

“Look at them.”

“UrGoh, enough.”

“Look at them, skekGra.” 

He looks. When one of urGoh’s hands touches his shoulder, he looks more closely.

“Oh,” he says.

“Do you see?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” 

“I thought you knew.”

“UrGoh!” He grasps at urGoh’s hand holding the mirror, pulling it back so he can see himself again. His nose, his cheek, his jaw, all marred, no, all gifted with lines, yes, but twisting into the flowing pattern of whorls he sees unfurling across urGoh’s face. They are less pronounced, soft and small, but dream-swirls nonetheless.

“Am I turning into you?” skekGra says, now unable to drag his eyes from the mirror. He tilts his head this way and that to better see the time he has spent with urGoh writ across his nose.

“I think,” urGoh says, moving it so they can both see each other, cheek to cheek, “we are becoming more like each other.”

“This is-,” skekGra searches for the word, “important. No, wonderful. No.” He looks at urGoh and sees himself looking back. 

“I like being you,” offers urGoh.

SkekGra closes his eyes, and exhales, slumping against himself. “Me too.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "I can feel my body dying all around me!" is a line from The Last Unicorn.


	4. Peachberries

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> UrGoh considers his options.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> These are slowly going from drabbles to one-shots and I'm sure no-one will really object!

“I didn’t _say_ you were too slow.”

“There was… an implication.”

“It would be nice to have some… fresher food. That’s all.”

“I can’t walk any faster.”

“I _know_.” 

UrGoh closes his eyes at skekGra’s barely contained groan of exasperation. He can hear his teeth grinding from the other side of their home. 

“If you don’t like what I bring back,” urGoh says, moving away and turning his head to look out of the door, to the sky where the brothers are nearing their zenith, “then go yourself. And quickly,” he adds, pointing skyward with his staff, “you’re missing the best part of the day.”

“The hottest you mean.”

“Yes.”

SkekGra paces over to him, bends down, twists his neck to meet urGoh’s eye, head sideways like some inquisitive bird. “You know I can’t go. They don’t trust me.”

“They didn’t trust me either, at the start.”

“It’s not the same.”

SkekGra’s head darts back at the thump of urGoh’s staff-end on the floor. “It’s exactly the same. Go. Build their trust, just as I had to do. It takes time; _that_ is why I am slow.” He closes his eyes, exhaling through his nostrils, recalling unum upon unum of scarce meals and the both of them thinner as a result. “The Dousan know more of the skeksis than they ever will of mystics and yet I hold parley with them.”

SkeGra tosses his head flippantly. “If you hadn’t all hidden yourselves away then maybe the Dousan would have been more expeditious in their-“

“Enough.” SkekGra stares at him, halted mid-sentence by the alien note of anger in urGoh’s voice. “Go.”

“But I don’t know where they-“

“No,” urGoh says, tail sweeping across the floor behind him. “Just go.”

SkekGra, taken-aback, is at least perceptive enough to know when he’s pushed too far. 

“As you wish, mystic.” He says after a pause, stalking off in a flourish of hems. UrGoh doesn’t see if he picks up the bags or not, nor if he actually leaves through the back entrance or merely holes himself up in their loft in a huff. SkekGra had asked for fresh meat, and urGoh cannot provide it. That was all, and he was growing weary of the same cyclical bickering over things he cannot change. 

Outside the day is relentless. UrGoh sits down near the edge of the promontory, sets his staff down by his feet and rummages in a pocket for his pipe and leaf. Coming up with nothing he sighs, unwilling to make the journey back inside for them lest he run into himself again and rekindle the fight.

Was it a fight? Whatever it was, it has been long in coming. He has seen skekGra bite his tongue so hard every time he returns from the caravan with supplies he feels the pressure in his own mouth, inevitable that one who seems to find some niggling fault in almost everything he does would eventually snap over this. 

His thoughts drift as the suns beat down on him. As he pulls off his hat and fluffs out the perpetually flattened hair beneath with a spare hand, he finds himself thinking of the Valley of the Stones, of his kin, and of what they might be doing at this self-same moment. It's a habit he has fallen into and he has stopped chiding himself for these bouts of nostalgia; better, he thinks, to ponder more pleasant things when he and skekGra are at odds.

The urRu have no arguments over food certainly. No arguments in general.

Was it better, he considers, to live in endless solidarity, peace and cooperation, friend to all and loved so well? Or was it boring, unfulfilling, redundant. Was that why he wandered?

It’s a question he has been asked often, by the others on his various returns in a how-do-you-do mien and by urSu who would never command or plead with him, but the suggestion was plain. Why would you leave us? Why spend so long absent from those who love you? Do you not love us?

It is question he still asks himself, more so in the aftermath of disagreement with his dark half. Always thinking of skekGra, he muses, even as he does little to strengthen the rickety bridges they have built between them. SkekGra, for all his faults, faults urGoh shares (stubbornness, single-mindedness, purpose and wanderlust which are faults among intractable faults when you are urRu) would find himself if he ever cared to shut his mouth and listen, to look, to know him, the newest recipient of urGoh's love.

That is the third question. If urGoh so grates on his other half with his lack of haste, his habits, his riddlesome way of speech, his ability to amuse himself in stillness and meditation, then why _does_ urGoh stay? If he could leave his kin who held him in such dear esteem, why tolerate the half of him that doesn't?

SkekGra, with his erratic paroxysms over the most innocuous minutiae; a messy workbench, a pot of herbs in the wrong place, exile, isolation, nightmares, howling and throwing arms in the air and making grooves in the floor with his pacing, whether he can help these things or not urGoh finds them often intolerable or at the very least unnecessary. Why not wander still and answer the call in his heart that still yearns for something he can’t quite name, but that has been singing out for a longer time than he cares to note. 

Perhaps they are bleeding into one another, skekGra more patient though he doesn’t outwardly show it, and urGoh more wont to put his foot down when his other half’s outbursts become ridiculous. Like today.

SkekGra’s face had something new written across it. Shock, possibly. Surprise at the rarest flash of urGoh’s normally well-wrapped temper. Hurt.

UrGoh is in no mood now, baking in the suns’ light, to feel bad about that one. Perhaps he is becoming more like a skeksis as the days tick by. Perhaps they are no longer dark and light, but grey and stubborn halves of each other, merging like two parallel rivers on their way to the sea.

 _It often comes to pass_ , urSu had said to him once as they walked together along the ridge overlooking the Valley, _that the ones hurt are often the ones that love you the most._

It was heavy-handed, even for urSu, and the meaning wasn’t lost on urGoh then or now. He had looked down into the home of his kin and seen them for what they were: family. 

_If you love me_ , he had said, watching the small figure of urUtt at his loom down below, all four hands occupied in passing the shuttle back and forth with an elegance that was akin to their song-gestures, _you will let me go to wander where I will._

 _So I will_ , urSu said. 

A gentle constant firepit of hot stones piled in a spiral, the cooking pot and its aroma wrapping around them. The Chanter’s songs, the Archer, on one of his own return visits beside him on the log, sharing a bowl of peachberries and pointing his arrow-head face at him when urGoh’s voice fell silent from the chorus. A hand on his. UrVa understood the calling within him. A divide, between basking in such love and serenity, and living and _leaving_ with purpose.

Purpose was not taboo. The mystics stayed in the Valley out of purpose, did not interfere purposefully. But urGoh could never silence the song in his heart that said you must be _more_.

He is weeping, he realises, hot tears that run down his nose and drip from his chin onto his hand. The desert breeze cools them on his skin, and he looks at his long fingers, balls them into fists, then lets them fall back into a half-curl where they lie in his lap. UrVa’s hand on his was less a gesture of comfort than one of solidarity; he had seen the Archer walking with urSu too, no doubt on the receiving end of his own version of the scolding, given with gentle words and worry in the Master’s crinkled eyes. They wandered for different reasons, urGoh always thought: urVa to atone, he to discover, but at the very least he had a kindred spirit in that regard.

Now he has discovered the most kindred of spirits he can, why push him away? Why, now, do thoughts come of the Valley of the Stones, not so terribly far from here, a journey he could make, slipping away in the dusk while skekGra sleeps beside him? 

*

“Here.” 

The suns are setting and UrGoh opens his eyes from a doze he doesn’t recall slipping into. SkekGra is kneeling beside him and looks much the worse for wear; what hair he has is plastered to his forehead, face and robes dusty. He’s holding out a bowl to urGoh, who bemusedly takes it and looks at the contents.

Peachberries.

“It was either those or fresh meat,” skekGra says, sitting properly beside him at not-quite arms-reach, perhaps wary of urGoh’s mood. He rests his elbows on his knees, and looks out toward the horizon, in the direction of the Valley, urGoh notices, though is sure it is coincidence. 

“I know you like them,” he adds, when urGoh doesn’t speak.

"You went."

"Yes."

"How did... never mind." He doesn't want to open it up again, sighs, glances out toward in the direction of his kin again without intending to, closes his eyes, opens them, studies the berries.

“Do you think about them often?”

UrGoh draws his gaze from the bowl to skekGra’s. “Peachberries?”

“No. The other mystics.”

“How do you know I’m thinking of them?”

SkekGra looks away, fiddling with a thread on his headwrap. “I think about the other skeksis. Sometimes,” he adds, “only sometimes.”

“Do you miss them?”

“You _can_ miss something that is no good for you,” skekGra says. “If it's all you ever knew." He straightens, tosses his head. "I don’t regret leaving, but you do, I think.”

UrGoh sets the bowl down between them. The tufted tip of his tail twitches behind him. “I regret… _having_ to leave.”

His other half laughs softly. “Imagine the both of us in your valley.”

UrGoh smiles sadly. “I wish it had been different.”

“Are you thinking of… returning?”

“I can't."

SkekGra nods at that non-answer, looking back out toward the suns-set again. The breeze is cool, and catches the drying hairs poking out from his head-wrap sending them snapping back and forth against his brow. 

“I don’t want to lose you,” he says after a pause. It’s soft as a chime, the vulnerability in his voice. UrGoh feels it harmonise with something in his chest, wants to reach out to him, tuck his head into the crook between shoulder and neck and never let him go. 

“Here,” urGoh says instead, nudging the bowl toward him with a finger. “Share these with me?” He can’t begin to unravel his yearning, his creeping indecision. “I do love them,” he says, in a quiet voice.

“Peachberries?” skekGra asks, taking one from the bowl and sniffing it. 

UrGoh shifts closer, shuffling over and lacing two arms around skekGra’s shoulders and back. SkekGra leans into him, chewing on the berry in silence. 

“Yes.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (I hope peachberries are actually meant to be nice?!)
> 
> The next part leads directly on from this in case that vague cliffhanger was too much :P


	5. The Right Note

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> UrGoh needs cheering up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And we're back! This chapter picks up more or less from where the previous one ended, if you need a refresher :)

On the third day of urGoh’s malaise, skekGra goes to him with knotted brows and arms akimbo, determined to needle it out of him. He pauses at the top of the ramp, his knife of a head slicing through the gaps in the hanging gauzes, and peers down at the urRu-shaped lump beneath the covers. Only the tip of urGoh’s nose and the tuft of his tail are visible, like some sulking childing though skekGra grants that urGoh is so hardly prone to such bouts of dramatics that the source is far more likely to be a deeper-seated problem than an extended huff over the supply run.

“Two choices, urGoh,” skekGra says, cocking his head and trying to wield some dramatics of his own in the hope he might just irritate urGoh into action, “either you tell me what’s wrong, or…” he pauses, having thought little on any repercussion befitting his other half’s refusal to get out of bed. Things haven’t been quite right between them since their quarrel, but he had thought urGoh somewhat mollified with the fruit. Well, not the fruit alone, he acknowledges. He had apologised, in not so many words but more in a hang-dog expression and a lowered head, in a quieter voice and in even quieter contemplation (and not one complaint about the peachberries whose acrid tang still meanders through his nostrils), and they had sat together until the suns had set and until urGoh had gone to bed, and not shown his nose over the loft threshold since. Whatever glacial thoughts he had had inching through his head he had not seen fit to vocalise. He hadn’t even bid him goodnight.

UrGoh ignores skekGra’s mulling and makes no move to either get up or respond. He draws his tail-tip beneath the blankets, away from skekGra’s tapping foot.

A different tack, perhaps. SkekGra sits down on a cushion beside the ruminating lump. He sees urGoh’s hookah set to one side, untouched, which in itself is peculiar enough to warrant remarking upon. 

“Did you run out of leaf?” he asks, lifting a corner of the blanket to peer at urGoh’s face. UrGoh turns his head away, so skekGra addresses his topknot instead. “I’m sure we have some stashed away, er, somewhere...” He tries to gentle his tone, biting down annoyance. He has actually enjoyed the lack of cloying smoke wreathing its way through their home, but if the trade-off is a miserable urGoh he’d prefer the clogged lungs. Something about his sad eyes and wilting posture being the result of actual upset sits very ill with him. “You know I’m always finding it stuffed into my jars. Or,” he adds, “I could go into the garden, see if I have anything ready for drying? You know it doesn’t take that long.”

UrGoh says nothing. SkekGra wishes he would break his silence even for the selfish novelty of having what could be their first sober conversation. Would he talk as languidly, as littered with nonsenses as before?

“Are you ill?” he asks, though already knows the answer. He himself feels no different, has no new pains, nausea, or headaches other than the constant one that ebbs and flows between the two of them but has never bedridden either of them or caused much more than a general grumbling to echo through the drapes. He scratches at the skin around the nail, prompted by thoughts of it. 

“Lonely?” he tries again, “bored?” He laughs then; they are nothing if not some personifications of loneliness and boredom, though he can’t say who is which. “Why don’t you get up and have a bath, or some tea. I could-” he baulks slightly, still even now finding difficulty in alluding to being amenable to the softer arts, to casual intimacies even though he finds himself pointing his nose in the direction of them more often than not. “I could rebraid your hair for you. You know, I’ve been getting better at that. It won’t be like the last time,” he prompts, nudging what he hopes is a shoulder. He thinks of his pitiful first attempt, prompted by curiosity after urGoh’s re-emergence from his ablutions one evening an unum ago, avoiding four swatting hands in the pursuit of retying his topknot for him whether he wanted him to or not. UrGoh had had the good manners not to offer critique, to wait until skekGra had gone to sleep to unravel the off-centre tangle and re-wind it.

“I’ve been practising,” he says quietly, thinking of all the knots in the curtains urGoh can’t have been blind to but never voiced curiosity over. “I wanted to do it for you.” 

“I know,” urGoh says, and it’s so muffled by the bedclothes and a mouthful of his own hair that skekGra barely interprets it as anything more than a clearing of the throat.

“Well then,” skekGra says, “why don’t I? Or,” an idea strikes him, remembering suddenly the comfort it brings him that not even he can deny, “why don’t you sing?” He puts a hand on urGoh’s back. “You always seem more content after you’ve sung.”

“Do not,” urGoh says with such unexpected emotion, batting his hand away and circling into an even more tightly-wound ball of blankets and limbs, “speak to me of singing.” 

“UrGoh-“

“I said do not.” 

“Why?”

UrGoh lifts his head and looks at him for the first time in three days and skekGra’s breath catches at the abject sorrow in his already downturned eyes, how heavy with seeming misery his heavy-lidded gaze is, how dark his expression etched into skin already the hue of the night sky. “They never sing back.”

“Who?” skekGra asks, though he already knows.

“The others.”

“Ah.” So it has indeed been worming its way through urGoh, since he complained about the meat, or since they found this place, or since their exiles, or since the vision. “Perhaps,” he tries pathetically, for he knows little still of mystic vagaries despite so long now sleeping beside one, which he knows is his own fault as he never asks about them, “perhaps they cannot hear you. The desert is vast.”

“There are ways,” urGoh says, shifting onto his stomach, propped up on elbows and nose almost brushing the pillow, “to sing so that they can hear me, even from so far away. I have tried to remember the magic,” he is staring at the weave on the pillow as if counting the threads, “but perhaps I have forgotten it after so long untested.”

SkekGra doesn’t know what to say. He finds one of urGoh’s hind-hands under the blanket’s edge and puts a tentative palm over it. UrGoh doesn’t pull away. “But you know where the valley is, you could go there.” He hates to bring it up despite himself, hates the idea of planting the seed. Hates the thought of urGoh actually going. _Selfish_ , he thinks, _to want him all to myself, but here we are, and how strange it is._

“The way in is protected by spells that I do not know how to undo.”

“They didn’t tell you?”

UrGoh says nothing.

“What about,” skekGra glances around the loft, as if to find the counter-enchantment lying amongst the pillows and fabrics, etched into the wood of the floor, or floating above them in the dusty air. “What about the other mystics, the other wanderers. Could they not tell you how to get in?”

“I can’t ask them.” 

SkekGra puts a hand over his eyes, incredulous. “UrGoh you-“, he bites his tongue, changing course. “Why not?”

“It’s not for them to tell. It wouldn’t be… right.” His eyes are so mournful that skekGra’s disbelief melts away into some shade of the dejection that is radiating from his other half. 

“So, you’re staying away out of courtesy?”

“More,” urGoh says, turning his head away again, “or less. To ask would be to… admit I was wrong. That we are wrong. They won’t,” he says, moving his hand from skekGra’s and pulling the blanket over his eyes again in what would be a rather overly dramatic gesture had it not been so out of character, “let you in.” 

“I think that’s to be expected,” skekGra says. 

“If I go in, I won’t come back out.” A sigh, so laden with the hopelessness of urGoh’s predicament that the curtains and the very stone around them seem to pulse in response. “And I will not be parted from you.”

A silence passes during which some part of the meaning in urGoh’s sentiment blooms in skekGra. At a second, rather more pathetic sigh from urGoh he musters himself, an idea striking him like a gong. 

“Right then, _up_.” He says, and before urGoh can make much sense of what is happening to even protest skekGra is hauling off the covers and hauling urGoh up with a hand under two of his armpits. UrGoh clutches fruitlessly at his rapidly disappearing blanket, expression that of bewilderment and no small amount of indignation.

“Oh stop that now,” skekGra says, trying to lift him up and get to his own feet and struggling with both, “I’ve seen worse things than you in your underclothes,” UrGoh throws him a stormy look over the bump of his nose, and he gives up somewhat, back on his knees beneath urGoh’s glare and beneath most of urGoh. “You’re heavier than you look.”

“I can get up without help,” urGoh mutters, making no effort to demonstrate.

“Then get up. Teach me to sing.”

UrGoh tries to say any number of different things to that and fails at them all, mouth opening and closing several times as he rights himself, sliding most of the way off of skekGra and getting both long feet both onto the floor which skekGra notes is a marked progression from his increased lassitude of late.

“You can’t sing,” he says, settling on what seems to be at least a logical proclamation of disbelief.

“I know,” skekGra says, “I’m horrendous. An even worse singer than I was a pacifist. Well, before. But surely I don’t need to prove to you,” he holds out a hand, getting up at last, “that I can improve.”

“I’m not sure,” urGoh says, contemplating skekGra’s offered palm before placing a hand in it again and allowing his other half to help him up at last, “that I have the skill to make you anything other than… a little less horrendous.”

“You did it once,” skekGra says, then tilts his head, serious. “I thought… you might like someone to sing with. Again.” 

UrGoh peers up at him, nose and neck and back all in a line. “Gra,” he says, and it’s all he says. There is a note of wonder in his voice, as fragile as ash, a wavering chime that echoes through all the chambers of skekGra’s heart. His fingers curl tightly around urGoh’s, and urGoh takes a step forward, the furthest he’s ventured from bed so far.

“Come on then,” skekGra begins down the ramp, tugging urGoh along by the hand and quite unable to put words to whatever it is that he can feel passing between them, some new little stitch pulling them closer. Better to stay distracted than dwell on the unknowable, he thinks. UrGoh is amenable to this, and ambles toward him as skekGra backs his way down. 

“I’ll do my warm-ups,” he says, looking behind him as he walks, “while you take a bath.”

UrGoh, messy-haired and dragging one of the blankets along with him, does not protest.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for checking this out! This will get more shippy/fade to black in later chapters, so if that's your cup of tea I hope you enjoy!


End file.
